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Existentialism
Existentialism or existential philosophy, an irrationalist current in contemporary bourgeois philosophy that emergedon the eve of World War I in Russia (L. Shestov and N. A. Berdiaev), after World War I in Germany(M. Heidegger, K. Jaspers, and M. Buber), and during World War II in France (J.-P. Sartre, G.Marcel, M. Merleau-Ponty, A. Camus, and S. de Beauvoir). Existentialism gained further currencythroughout Europe during the 1940’s and 1950’s, and in the USA during the 1960’s. In Italy, the best-known existential thinkers are E. Castelli, N. Abbagnano, and E. Paci; in Spain, J.Ortega y Gasset was close to existentialism; and in the USA, the existential philosophy waspopularized by W. Lowrie, W. Barrett, and J. Edie. Certain religious-philosophical currents areclosely related to existentialism—specifically, French personalism, as represented by E. Mounier,M. Nédoncelle, and J. Lacroix, and the dialectical theology of K. Barth, P. Tillich, and R. Bultmann.B. Pascal, S. Kierkegaard, M. de Unamuno, F. M. Dostoevsky, and F. Nietzsche are regarded asthe precursors of existentialism by its adherents. The philosophy of life and the phenomenology ofE. Husserl were influential in the development of existentialism. Diverging from traditional rationalist philosophy and science, in which mediation is considered thebasic principle of thought, existentialism seeks to comprehend being as a kind of unmediated andundivided unity of subject and object. Primordial and authentic being is identified with experience,which is interpreted in existentialism as the subjective experience of “being-in-the-world.” Theexistentialist regards being as an unmediated given, or as human existence—which, in hisjudgment, cannot be known by scientific or even by philosophical means. In order to describe the structure of existence, many of the existentialists, such as Heidegger,Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, resort to the phenomenological method of Husserl; they consider thestructure of consciousness to be constituted of its orientation toward the other—that is, itsintentionality. Existence is “open”; it is directed toward the other, which becomes its center ofattraction. According to Heidegger and Sartre, existence is being, which is directed toward nothingand is aware of its own finite-ness. Thus, Heidegger’s description of the structure of existenceamounts to a description of the various modes of human existence—such as concern, dread,resolution, and conscience— which are defined by death and which represent various means ofcontact with nothingness, movement toward or flight from nothingness, or other type of relation to it.Thus, too, it is at moments of extreme shock, which Jaspers calls boundary situations, thatexistence reveals itself to man as the root of his being. Existentialism defines existence by its finiteness; the latter is interpreted as temporality, whosereference point is represented by death. In contrast to physical time, which is pure quantity, or anendless series of passing moments, existential time is qualitative, finite, and nonrepeatable; forHeidegger and Jaspers, it represents fate. Existential time is inseparable from that whichconstitutes the essence of existence, including birth, love, repentance, and death. What theexistentialists emphasize in the phenomenon of time is the decisive significance of the future;viewing the future in conjunction with such existential concepts as “resolution,” “project,” and“hope,” they stress the personal-historical (rather than the impersonal-cosmic) nature of time andaffirm its connection to human activity and to men’s strivings, efforts, and expectations. In existentialism, the historicity of human existence is reflected in its always being in a givensituation—a situation into which it is “thrown” and with which it is forced to reckon. The individual’smembership in a particular nation or caste and his being endowed with such specific qualities asbiological and psychological traits—all these circumstances are empirical manifestations of thefundamentally situational nature of existence, or of its “being-in-the-world.” The temporality,historicity, and situational nature of existence are modes of its finiteness. Another important existential concept is transcendence, or “being beyond.” The different types ofphilosophical reasoning that distinguish the various exponents of existentialism depend on theparticular interpretation of the transcendent and of the very act of transcending. Jaspers, Marcel,and the late Heidegger acknowledge the reality of the transcendent; the predominant element intheir philosophy is the symbolic, or even (in Heidegger) the mythic-poetic—in that the transcendentis unknowable and can only be “alluded to.” This may be contrasted to the critical doctrine of Sartreand Camus, who set themselves the goal of demonstrating the illusory nature of transcendence. Existentialism rejects both the rationalist tradition of the Enlightenment, which reduces freedom tothe recognition of necessity, and the humanist-naturalist tradition, for which freedom consists indiscovering man’s natural inclinations and liberating his “essential” forces. For the existentialist,freedom is existence itself, and existence is freedom. Inasmuch as the structure of existence isexpressed in “movement-toward” (that is, movement toward something that is not one’s ownexistence), or transcendence, the existentialist’s definition of freedom depends on his interpretationof transcendence. For Marcel and Jaspers, this means that freedom can be found in god alone. ForSartre, on the other hand, inasmuch as to be free means to be oneself, “man is doomed to be free.”In existentialism, freedom represents a heavy burden; man, insofar as he is an individual being,must bear that burden. He can renounce his freedom, can cease being himself, and can become“like all,” but only at the cost of repudiating himself as a person. For Heidegger, the world in which man is immersed is called “they” (in German, man); it is animpersonal world where everything is anonymous, where there are no subjects of actions but onlyobjects of actions, and where everyone, including man in relation to himself, is “other”; it is a worldin which no one decides anything and therefore no one is responsible for anything. For Berdiaev,this world is called “the world of objedification,” and its attributes are “(1) the alienation of the objectfrom the subject; (2) the absorption of the uniquely individual and personal by the general,impersonal, and universal; (3) the dominant role of necessity and of determinability from without,entailing the suppression and shutting out of freedom; and (4) the adjustment to the massive scaleof the world and history, accommodation to the average man, and socialization of man and ofman’s opinions, resulting in the destruction of originality” (Opyt eskhatologicheskoi metafisiki,Paris, 1949, p. 63). Contacts between individuals in this objectified world are not genuine; they merely underscore eachperson’s isolation. According to Camus, we are confronted with nothingness, which makes humanlife senseless and absurd; the gap between individuals cannot be bridged, and genuine intercoursebetween them is impossible. Both Sartre and Camus see falsity and hypocrisy in all forms ofpersonal intercourse—such as love and friendship— sanctified by traditional religion and morality.Sartre’s characteristic passion for exposing distorted and transmuted forms of consciousness, or“bad faith,” turns in essence into the demand for acceptance of the reality of consciousness asdetached from others and from itself. Camus acknowledges only one mode of genuine intercourse—namely, the unity of individuals in revolt against the “absurd” world and against the finiteness,mortality, imperfection, and senselessness of human existence. Ecstasy may unite one individualwith another, but in essence this is the ecstasy of destruction, or rebellion, engendered in “absurd”man by despair. Marcel proposes a different solution to the problem of human intercourse. In his view, thedisconnectedness of individuals is due to the fact that the being of objects is taken to be the onlypossible being. But genuine being, or transcendence, is not the being of objects; rather, it ispersonal being, and consequently the authentic relationship to being is dialogue. Being, accordingto Marcel, is not “it” but “thou”; therefore the prototype of man’s relation to being is his relation toanother person, as witnessed by god. Transcendence is the act by means of which man goesbeyond the limits of his locked-in egoistic self. Love is transcendence—breaking through to theother, be the other human or divine; insofar as this breakthrough cannot be understood by means ofreason, Marcel assigns it to the sphere of “mystery.” Genuine human intercourse is not the only way of breaking through the objectified world, or theworld of the “they”; according to the existentialists, such breakthroughs also take place in thesphere of artistic and philosophical creativity. Both genuine communication and creativity, however,carry within themselves a tragic flaw: the world of objectivity constantly threatens to destroyexistential communication. For this reason, according to Jaspers, everything in the world isultimately subject to destruction by virtue of the very finiteness of existence, and man musttherefore learn to live and love with the constant awareness that everything he loves is fragile andfinite, not excluding love itself. But the deeply hidden pain resulting from such awareness imparts aparticular purity and spirituality to man’s affections. Berdiaev’s eschatological doctrine is based onthis awareness of the fragility of any form of authentic existence. The predominant mood in existentialism is one of dissatisfaction and searching; the existentialistseeks to negate and go beyond what has been attained. The tragic and generally pessimistic slantof this philosophy testifies to the state of crisis of contemporary bourgeois society and the extremeforms of alienation prevailing therein; existentialism may therefore be called the philosophy ofcrisis. The various exponents of existentialism differ in their sociopolitical positions. Thus, Sartre andCamus were members of the resistance movement; beginning in the late 1960’s, Sartre’s positionwas marked by extreme left radicalism and extremism. Camus’s and Sartre’s ideas wereparticularly influential in shaping the sociopolitical program of the new left movement. Jaspers andMarcel were liberals in their political orientation, while the sociopolitical views of Heidegger—in histime a Nazi collaborator—are markedly conservative in nature. Existentialism reflected the spiritual state of bourgeois society and laid bare its ills andcontradictions; it was unable, however, to propose a way out of the situation. The ideas and themes of existentialism have been treated in Western European, American, andJapanese contemporary literature; their influence can be traced not only in the literary works of theexistentialist philosophers themselves—Sartre, Camus, Marcel, and de Beauvoir—but also in thework of such writers as A. Malraux, J. Anouilh, E. Hemingway, N. Mailer, J. Baldwin, I. Murdoch,W. Golding, and Abe Kobo. REFERENCES Gaidenko, P. Ekzistentsializm i problema kul’tury. Moscow, 1963. Schwarz, T. Ot Shopengauera k Kheideggeru. Moscow, 1964. (Translated from German.) Sovremennyi ekzistentsializm. Moscow, 1966. Solov’ev, E. Iu. “Ekzistentsializm.” Voprosy filosofii, 1966, no. 12; 1967, no. 1. Solov’ev, E. Iu. “Ekzistentsializm.” In Burzhuaznaia filosofiia XX veka. Moscow, 1974. Sovremennaia burzhuaznaia filosofiia. Moscow, 1972. Chapters 13 and 14. Foulquie, P. L’Existentialisme. Paris, 1947. Castelli, E. Existentialisme théologique. Paris, 1948. Siebers, G. Die Krisis des Existentialismus. Hamburg-Bergedorf, 1949. Müller, M. Existenzphilosophie im geistigen Leben der Gegenwart. Heidelberg, 1949. Lenz, J. Der moderne deutsche und französische Existentialismus, 2nd ed. Trier, 1951. Wahl, J. Les Philosophies de I’existence. Paris, 1954. Allen, E. L. Existentialism From Within. London 1953. Heinemann, F. Existenzphilosophie lebendig oder tot? Stuttgart 1954. Heinemann, F. Jenseits des Existentialismus. 1957. Gignoux, V. La Philosophie existentielle. Paris, 1955. Lukacs, G. Existentialisme ou marxisme ed.. Paris 1961. Bollnow, O. F. Existenzphilosophie, 5th ed. Stuttgart, I960. Abbagnano, N. lntroduzione all’esistenzialismo ed.. 1967. P. P. GAIDENKO